Oh dear, the first link to download Carrara 8.5 beta takes you to the Daz Studio 4.5 beta instead. The second link takes you to http://www.daz3d.com/shop/carrara-8-5-beta/ which returns a page not found. Anyone have the correct link to use to download the new beta?
Boojum

Oh dear, the first link to download Carrara 8.5 beta takes you to the Daz Studio 4.5 beta instead. The second link takes you to http://www.daz3d.com/shop/carrara-8-5-beta/ which returns a page not found. Anyone have the correct link to use to download the new beta?
Boojum

you reset Carrara 8 in my account to get it . some people get it some not - they are working on it .

Think it is time for me to dump DAZ. Beta isn't working with their serial number and now my pro update has stopped working too. If they keep screwing up simple stuff like this, there is no hope that the product will be worth a damn in the long run. You finally reach a limit............

There should be no link, the files are listed in your purchase of Carrara 8 or Carrara 8 Pro. If you have not purchased one of those items, you cannot access the beta files.

I see that you, or someone, has removed the erroneous download link in the first post of this thread. You have, however, missed a second link near the bottom of the post which reads, "How do I get this updated Beta Build of Carrara 8.5?", followed by another dead Carrara 8.5.0.172 Beta link.
You might want to remove that also, to avoid further confusion.

Right ,there is a beta in my downloads,it was under "Carrara 8 Upgrade",no mention of the word "beta" anyware. It is beta " .132" which I assume was from a while ago?........................Yes, I have "reset", many times......I Wonder if the new SN number will work with an old beta? Do you know what ,I really cant be bothered to find out....
Wake me up,when 8.5 is finished.

Right ,there is a beta in my downloads,it was under "Carrara 8 Upgrade",no mention of the word "beta" anyware. It is beta " .132" which I assume was from a while ago?........................Yes, I have "reset", many times......I Wonder if the new SN number will work with an old beta? Do you know what ,I really cant be bothered to find out....
Wake me up,when 8.5 is finished.

Nice one Holly! I'm saving up for a cryochamber! Ta Bigh,I would rather try the latest beta,I will try this one If I need the Bullet physics,I found them better in the last beta I tried, which is probably this beta I just downloaded...........cripes, I am starting to get confused......

Nice one Holly! I'm saving up for a cryochamber! Ta Bigh,I would rather try the latest beta,I will try this one If I need the Bullet physics,I found them better in the last beta I tried, which is probably this beta I just downloaded...........cripes, I am starting to get confused......

Ok, so I think I may need to do some dynamic draping. So I ve downloaded the .132 beta ( the only one I seem to be able to get.) I think this is the vers. I had a while ago,but deleted when the serial ran out,and I wasnt doing much Carraring, Thinking when I got back into it I could just upgrade to the full version, because surely It would out by then?......guess not.....
Anyways up, it all seems to be as suitable as it was the last time, the draping of simple cloths seems as solid as it was,and far better than 8.1, And that is all I will probably be using it for.
So the thing thats nagging at my brain is, am I missing out on any dynamics goodness in the latest beta,or is it just Genesis tweaking. Anyone remember or thought "wow .172 is miles better than .132 at draping tablecloths!"........or is it maybe worse.

I only really use Carrara for Draping,Hairing and Rendering at the moment.

So the thing thats nagging at my brain is, am I missing out on any dynamics goodness in the latest beta,or is it just Genesis tweaking. Anyone remember or thought "wow .172 is miles better than .132 at draping tablecloths!"........or is it maybe worse.

I think it's safe to say that the draping results have generally improved with each beta release. However, what once existed (but is now lost) is the ability to drape on a moving object. Not sure when they disconnected that, but the latest is only good for static draping.

On a brighter note, they connected the Density setting which previously wasn't usable.

And the Stiffness and Bending settings are far more flexible than previous incarnations. They have a wide usable range now.

The whole thing has probably years of development to go before it's a good cloth sim, but for now it's at least usable in a very limited sense.

Does this latest beta seem picky about importing .duf's to anyone else? I've had a heck of a time trying to import .duf scenes. Weird figure distortion is one of the problems I've had. Another one is it says my figure is missing morphs or whatever and just won't finish the import. Quite odd.

Oh, and I pray a later beta will put in the ability to change Genesis UV maps on the fly like DS4.5 does.That is essential to full use of Genesis.

After reading this, I decided to try out Genesis again.
I don't use DS, so perhaps I just need to install an updated version of that, but I built a wonderful character without hassel. I was also amazed at how my custom morphs on my V4 hair stayed put even after auto-fit.
What killed me is that none of the face morphs worked :( couldn't even get her mouth to open :(

Sorry for not being able to try out the DUF imports for ya. I'd much rather build stuff from within Carrara - but... like I said, I have yet to try out the latest and greatest Daz Studio

Some of the differences I've been noticing with Genesis in Carrara from the previous version is that none of the morphs come with the ability to use negative numbers on the sliders without changing the settings, which isn't a huge deal - but it's there. Again, perhaps it's just that I need the new genesis. I'll try that right now.

I loaded in Genesis and applied Dimension Theory's Carraracters: Delphinia shaders. As we all know, they went to the wrong handlers. So I then loaded V4 and applied the same shaders, and performed Edit > Remove Unused Masters > Consolidate Duplicate Shaders

Then I renamed all of the shaders, using V4 in the texture room to get the proper names. Delete V4 and apply the correct shader names where they belonged in Genesis and, voila! Worked like a charm! Looked great too!

I can't wait to see the Genesis performance in the next beta. It is getting so close that I can taste it! Too bad for the DUF transfer problems, but who knows... these geniuses will likely iron that out soon too.

Cool. I updated DS and the products that were giving load errors and all is much better, yet there are some morphs that still don't function - I'm fairly certain that these have to be re-installed to work.

Got a pretty decent character together. My custom V4 hair gets stretched kinda funny when the arms bend down to a relaxed position but, like mentioned earlier, my custom morphs still work. I decided to try my customized V4 clothing as well - awesome to see the morphs working! I added a morph to Genesis as well - which went very well but I couldn't find the morph after I was done. Perhaps I have to uncheck the topology protection. no big deal either way.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that the expression morphs work so well. Where I used to have to be very careful to set "Eyes Closed" to .1 (or was it .2?) to keep the eyelids from wrapping far beyond their needed placing, they now close perfectly at 1.0

Having some crazy addiction to purchasing ALL of the human style morphs and most creature/monster morphs, I'm also very impressed with how powerful this single model can be. Truly amazing, the possibilities! Not sure if that's why it take sooooo loooong to save... but....

I have noticed, however, that multiple Genesis in the same scene don't seem to add much to the load/save time. Also, similarly to what I've noticed about Windows 7, is that even though it may take time to save (windows 7 shut down takes some time), loading the scene back up (like starting Windows 7) is pleasantly quick.

Additionally, with such a load of available animated pose files(and aniBlocks) available, the animation possibilities with Genesis are so awesome to behold. Sure, the feet don't match right. I just delete all of the feet keys and rework the feet animations. But with all of those wonderful "Morphform" style morph dials, plus the extra bones like the second abdomen and pelvis, that tweaking while keeping most of the original motions is incredible.

Okay, now I noticed that Genesis loads into Carrara with Smoothing on the render set to 1. I set it to 0 and turned off smoothing on the model - just to see what I would see. Genesis still looked great. Hmnpf!

The difference between how Genesis works with this beta version and the previous offering is wonderfully enormous. It's been some time since this one came out, too... so I can hardly imagine the bliss that we'll have in store for us. One of these days I need to actually try out DS again just to compare the two ways of handling Genesis.

I wonder if there will ever be a way to incorporate some of those Daz figure creation/saving capabilities directly into Carrara. Might be a cool addition for C9 - the ability to auto bone figures to the Daz spec, export to duf and/or cr2, unlock that ability to create new morph targets on Daz products, we already have decimation in the model room - never tried it though, etc., etc.,

Well, I re-installed expressives for Genesis, re downloaded and installed again... more than half of them don't work.
You can take your time, though... nobody has made any long curly hair for Genesis yet, and the custom hair I made for V4, after auto-fit, moves funny even when Genesis blinks her eyes. Must be allocating weight mapping funny - or something.